Under conventional approaches, provisioning a subscriber to allow international roaming for cellular customers is accomplished primarily by manual processes. Often, the user is required to call or contact the carrier, either in advance or when roaming internationally, in order to enable services. From the carrier perspective, international roaming requires the carrier to establish services for the requesting customer with the international carrier. Sometimes the subscriber is not able to contact the carrier with the phone because of the service limitation, and must resort to making a call by other means to contact the operator internationally.
A Home Location Register (HLR) is an existing element in the infrastructure of wireless communication services. Wireless carriers typically employ HLRs to maintain date for registering wireless devices on a wireless network, as well as for routing calls to wireless devices. Wireless devices register with the HLR, and the HLR determines the location (e.g., by serving Mobile Switching Center (MSC)) of the wireless device when, for example, the wireless device joins a wireless network.